Bask In Ryan Lochte’s Starmaking Turn On 30 Rock As “Sex Idiot”

Thought you’d heard the last of Ryan Lochte (at least until 2016), did you? Figured he’d do movement, and an endless parade of beauty pageant winners, comfortably under your radar until Rio? We don’t blame you for thinking it – how often do you hear about swimmers, even those on the level of Michael Phelps, during any non-Summer-Olympics period? – but at least for now, you thought wrong.

You knew Lochte was interested in acting based on that now-infamous 90210 cameo and accompanying interview, but he might never get a better role than what 30 Rock offered him last night. (Not least because it’s hard to imagine another show as good as 30 Rock having him on.) The backstory: Alec Baldwin’s Jack is seeing several different women, each of whom fills a specific role. One woman fills the role of “sex idiot.”

Unbeknownst to Jack, though, one of the women he’s seeing is seeing several different men. Jack acts fine with this, since he should be: he’s doing the same thing, so why can’t she? His problem, though, is he fancies himself the complete package, and her needing other men to fill different romantic roles shatters his illusion. Anyway, she also had a sex idiot. You can probably see where it’s going from here, unless you’re some sort of sex idiot:

And Lochte wasn’t done there: later, a panicky Jack forces all of the woman’s lovers to convene in his office.

Maybe not the most challenging role, but Lochte acquitted himself pretty well, jeah? Baby steps.

Also noteworthy here, from a sporty perspective: one of the other boyfriends, Ken Tremendous, will sound familiar to you if you were a fan of the old sportswriting-fisking blog Fire Joe Morgan. “Ken Tremendous,” of course, was one of the writers for that blog – and his real-life identity is Michael Schur, who co-created Parks and Recreation and used to write (and play Dwight’s cousin on) The Office. Pretty prominent shoutout for a site with such humble beginnings.